School Lunch

 Here are little Boyd and Chithruby with their brand-new, thirty-dollar Pottery Barn backpacks that I got for four bucks each.  Any questions?  I might have a serious addiction to bargains.  But four bucks, come on.  These are good quality!  It will be years before Chithruby has to change her name in favor of a replacement backpack.  It will also be years before she goes to school, but she was not about to leave the store without her own backpack, and really, how could we pass up Chithruby?  Ari (or Kennedy, according to her $4 lunchbox, regular retail price $29.50 withOUT monogram) suggested unpicking the "d" so that Ptolemy could be just "boy."  That would just be sad and kooky.  Boyd is a very nice name.

For lunches this year, now that we have new monogrammed thermal lunchboxes, we are doing exclusively home lunches.  I fell into a bad habit last year of buying school lunch.  It was a source of guilt, assuaged only by Xanthe's enthusiasm for school lunch.  The other kids see it for what it is:  poison.  This is not the homemade goodness made by real people that I experienced as a child. (Ah, the soft rolls, the tomato soup, the French dips, the peanut butter bars!  Remember the peanut butter bars?)   I felt sad about not providing the kids with a healthier alternative, but it was easier to click that payment button than to roll out the peanut butter and jelly day after day.  There is nothing I hate more in all of parenting than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  The whole idea of them is repugnant to me, from the mess it takes to make them to the oversweet glop they provide for your taste buds.

The other problem with school lunch was that I would only pay for a few at a time because, for one, it's expensive, and also because I kept telling myself I would start packing nutritious lunches for my children...any minute now.

This year, I had to have a better plan.  I started with a ban on school lunch.  All the kids have a zero balance in their account, and I am going to leave it like that so we don't have the crutch of "just getting school lunch this one time."  Then I put the kids in charge of making their own lunches.  Now my only job is to make sure we have something to go IN the munches, which is no small task, but I'm hoping it ultimately becomes easier as we get used to the routine.  Even if it takes a bit more planning, I already feel better about sending my kids out the door.  I bought each of them a tupperware with a separate section for dip, which they love to put creative combinations in.

Today I had the brilliant idea of buying a bag of rolls and making Strawberry jam and Nutella sandwiches, then freezing them so the kids can grab one every morning for their lunch.  We have frozen sandwiches before, and it works great.  Someone gave me a tip of spreading both slices of bread with peanut butter (or Nutella) so the jam doesn't touch the bread and make it soggy during the freezing process.  That makes a big difference with PB and J, and I hope it works with Nutella on rolls, too.

My other stock items are Baby Bell cheese, which are far more appealing to my kids than cheese sticks, chips and dip of some sort, and fresh fruits.  It is dreadful that I have to make a conscious effort to put real, live fruit in the lunches, but kids on the whole get used to not eating whole foods, with all the conveniently packaged kid foods that have become so nauseatingly ubiquitous.  You should have seen the horror on kids' faces when I brought bags of grapes and bottles of water as post-baseball snacks last year.  You would have thought I was handing out deer scat and encouraging them to pop a few pellets in their mouths.

Who knows if any of this will stick.  I always have big plans at the beginning of the school year, which inevitably get diluted by mid-spring.  My hope is that it will end up being cheaper, easier, healthier and less guilt-inducing to stock the kitchen with whole foods and let the kids manage their own lunch boxes.

Some lunch box favorites:  Pita chips and hummus, plain old chips in a 50-pack from Sam's Club, grapes, a whole apple, pear or peach, Clementines, cheese, crackers, chips and salsa, chocolate cake (Chocolate is a vegetable and I saw proof of it on Facebook), Fiber One bars, cold pizza, (Yes, I know there are people who think that's weird.  Freestone is one of them), hard-boiled eggs, sugar snap peas, cole slaw, carrots, salad with lots of fruits, feta and nuts, homemade cookies or sweetbreads, bananas, yogurt-covered raisins, yogurt, yogurt and fruit, yogurt and granola (we are huge consumers of yogurt at our house), nuts and trail mix.

Obviously, we're not going overboard on the healthiness - not going microbiotic or anything, folks - but by not forcing my kids to purchase the preservative cocktails that are school lunch, I hope to preserve their health to some degree, as well as my peace of mind.